A Do-Good Day

Saturday was going to be a do-good day for me from start to finish. In the morning I woke up and joined a bunch of neighbors, led by A-Joz, in cleaning up the grounds of our condo complex. We didn’t find too much, except for the people who cleaned down by the railroad tracks. One of them found an old-school Mountain Dew can that was steel instead of aluminum! We told her she should clean it up and sell it online, but she just recycled it.

In the afternoon my band played downtown to raise money for the Literacy Fund; there was a band on every corner, busking for books. Rockstar Tailor wanted to sing with us but was put out to find out this was actually a charitable event, and we weren’t going to keep any of the tips. She said, “I don’t do free gigs!” (Usually her mother says the same thing, but Hardingfele actually got us this gig.) It was a beautiful afternoon, and we got lots of tips… probably way more than if we had just been busking for ourselves. That’s OK, it was for a way better cause than advancing my own literacy by buying yet another word game puzzle magazine.

In the evening Richard Bonomo and I had another do-good plan: we were going to go to a fancy burger joint where cops would wait on us, and all the tips would go to Special Olympics. One of my neighbors had told us about it during the cleanup and had even given me a couple of $3 off coupons. However, when we got there, we learned that our waiters would be the usual teenagers because the cop was only there during the lunch shift, and he didn’t even wait on anyone, he just went around collecting money. So we didn’t do anything other-centered for dinner after all, we just got it for $3 off apiece. Hey, we tried.

Famous Hat